


Sailor's Girl

by TheJGatsby



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:15:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killian Jones and Emma Swan were childhood friends, until events of the 1930s tore them away from each other. On shore leave from the navy, Killian returns to see her for the first time in years before he ships out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1926, 1929

1926

“Emma! Come on in, honey, it’s getting dark.” Mary Margaret Swan leaned against her doorframe and looked up and down the street, but didn’t see her daughter anywhere. “Emma?”

A small black-haired boy popped out of the space between two houses. “She’s hiding. We’re playing hide and seek.”

“Oh! Killian don’t jump out like that you nearly killed me.”

“Sorry Mrs. Swan, but she’s not gonna come out till I find her.”

Mary Margaret grinned at him. “You’d better start looking, then, huh?”

“Yes ma’am!” He scampered away down the street, peering down alleyways and between garbage cans. After a few minutes she heard him shout, “A-HA! Found you!” And then there was laughter and shrieking as Emma tried to run away and Killian chased her all the way to her doorstep, where she hid behind her mother and declared herself safe. He stuck out his tongue and waved goodbye, running home to his own mother’s call.

\----

Emma and Killian were often thought to be two sides of the same wild, willful child- one tall and dark and dashing, the other small and blonde and stubborn. It was rare to see one without the other, but when seen together, trouble was almost sure to follow. The two grew up on the streets of New York during a time when everything was good and the world was prosperous, filled with life and light and the dazzling bustling spirit of the Roaring Twenties.

The two shared in everything from secrets to schoolyard fights. They were each other’s first tentative six-year-old kiss, a shy peck on the lips followed by enthusiastic gagging and a promise to never, ever do that again because it was just gross. When May Louise decided to make fun of Emma’s worn shoes, she quickly learned her lesson as she lay on the ground with Killian sitting on top of her and pulling her hair and screaming for her to apologize. Emma returned the favor when Edwin Peters thought he could get away with calling Killian stupid and ended up with a black eye and wounded pride.

They each seemed to always know what the other was thinking, and whenever one was in trouble both had to be punished because they would fight over who was going to take the fall- Emma would insist on taking the blame because she didn’t want Killian to get in trouble, and Killian would insist on telling the truth because it was really his fault. Their language was one of inside jokes and pinky promises, and whenever they went anywhere together you could be guaranteed they were holding hands.

1929

Emma assumed after that day that she would never see her best friend again.

Killian’s father, a banker, had lost everything in the crash- including, by his own hand, his life.

Killian wore black and so did Emma. He tried not to cry, but failed, and she held his hand in hers and pretended she didn’t see the tears on his face.

A few days later, she woke up to the sound of rocks hitting her window. She knew it was him, as it always was, and ran downstairs to let him in the kitchen door, like she always did. They lay in her bed with the covers pulled over their heads and he hugged her as tight as his eight-year-old arms could and just cried. Eventually, he told her in broken sobs that his mother was taking him and his brother out to the countryside to live with his aunt and she said they might never come back. Emma hugged him as tight as she could with her eight-year-old arms and just cried.

A week later, Killian Jones was gone, as though he’d never been there at all. Emma still stared at the empty house half the time, and some nights she woke up imagining the sound of rocks hitting her window. When she went downstairs to open the door, though, there was no one there, and she felt lonelier than ever. Emma and Killian had been thick as thieves, and now she missed him with all her heart.


	2. 1941, 1942

January 1941

A tap, tap, tapping on her window woke the twenty-year-old Emma Swan from a deep sleep. She rolled over and shut her eyes, but to no avail. Tap, tap, tap. Finally she got out of bed and opened the window, just in time to almost get a small rock straight to the face. Furious, she leaned out and hissed, “Who the hell are you and what do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s me, Killian. D’you remember me, Swan?”

“Killian Jones?” she replied incredulously.

“The very same. Can I come up?”

Dazed, she blinked down at the dim figure in her yard. “Yes, of course, I’ll… I’ll go open the back doo-”

“No need.” He was already halfway up the side of her house, clinging to the vines and the trellis under her window. “Give me a hand here, Swan?” She wrapped her hands around his wrist and pulled him up through the window, falling backwards in the process. He landed on top of her, just barely catching himself on his hands and knees. As he grinned at her, she was struck by how handsome he’d become in twelve years. “You’ve redecorated.”

“I- uh, yeah, I have.” He stood and held out his hand to help her to her feet. “You stopped writing, Killian. I haven’t heard from you in years.”

“I think you’ll find it was you who stopped writing, actually. The last letter was, what, six years ago? You were upset with me because I told you that Marcus boy sounded like bad news and you just stopped writing.”

She laughed. “You were right, he was an idiot. I didn’t want to admit it.”

Killian shrugged, flopping into her desk chair and casting his long legs out in front of him. “I was a boy then, Swan, I knew what boys were like.”

Emma sat back on her bed with her knees tucked up to her chin. “It’s been years since anyone called me that.”

“What, Swan?”

“Yeah.” She tugged wistfully at the hem of her pajamas. “You were the only one.”

“Emma just never quite fit you. It was too plain. You’re anything but plain, Swan.” He cracked another grin and her heart skipped a beat.  
“What brings you back to the city, anyway? I thought you and your brother were going to work the farm once your uncle got old.”

He turned his eyes solemnly to the ground. “War’s in the air, Swan. Even if the States don’t get involved, which is unlikely, we still need men to defend the country.”

“You don’t mean-”

“Yeah. Navy. I’m on shore leave right now. I thought I’d come see my dearest friend again before they ship me off.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips as he looked back at her.

She rested her chin on her knees and stared sadly at the floor. “Where are they sending you?”

“Oh just some no-account Hawaiian base, Pearl Harbor. We’re not going to see any kind of action, the Japanese and the Chinese are doing their fighting well away, more towards the Phillipines. Don’t worry about me, Swan, I’ll be fine.”

She smiled. “I hope so.”

The conversation went on for hours. Gradually Killian found himself moving closer and closer to her, until he was sitting next to her on her bed. The two lay back and stared at the ceiling, painting stories in the darkness with their hands as they spoke. As the night wore on, Killian realized that Emma had dozed off with her head resting on his shoulder. He gazed at her, awestruck by how the rowdy little girl he'd known had become so beautiful. As gently as he could, he kissed her forehead. Her eyes opened and she smiled at him, before leaning up to kiss him sweetly on the lips.

They spent the night in each other's arms, and the morning he kissed her again and climbed out the window.

December 7, 1941

“Read all about it!” the newspaper boy called from the corner as Emma trudged, exhausted, down the twilit street. “Japs bomb Pearl Harbor! Whole naval base sunk! Read all about it!”

She froze.

In that moment Emma didn’t know whether to scream or to sob or to just stand silently and let the reality wash over her like a tidal wave.

Killian was dead. Gone. Forever.

She leaned on a wall to steady herself and slid down to the ground. Her hands shook and tears dripped off her jaw and onto her shirt as heavy, ragged sobs tore through her.

Killian. Dead.

It just wasn’t possible. She had just written him yesterday, there was no way he was gone. Pulling herself to her feet, she managed to make her way home, pausing occasionally to grab a wall and steady herself. It was like the whole world had gone out from under her and she had nothing left to stand on.

Killian was dead and a war was on, without a doubt. The other young men would be gone soon, too, just as they had been twenty-five years ago when her father went off to fight.

For the rest of the night she lay in her bed and read and re-read and re-re-read every letter she had from Killian, and when her eyes grew too bleary from exhaustion and tears she stared at the photo of him, so proper in his navy uniform, stone-faced but retaining the feeling of a rakish grin about to dance across his lips. That was all she had of him now, she came to realize. A photo and a couple dozen letters. That was all she would ever have of him.

Emma Swan buried her face in her pillow and wept for him.

March, 1942

Emma lay her head down on the kitchen table, her eyes drifting shut after a long day at the ammunition factory. She snapped herself awake, only to doze back into oblivion. Suddenly she was brought out of her cycle of half-sleep by a knock at the door. Sleepily, she dragged herself to her feet and shuffled over to open it.

“Swan.”

He smiled broadly at her, a real, true smile unlike his usual impish grin. It made his face light up in a way she didn’t think she’d seen before. His left arm was immobilized in a sling and his face was scruffy with the beginnings of a beard or maybe just with not having shaved. He was still wearing his uniform, and his hat was just barely askew, covering the tops of bandages that ran up the left side of his neck and head.

She stood frozen, completely unable to believe her eyes. Tentatively she reached out and touched his shoulder. Her mouth opened but no words came out. A tear started to fall, the first on since she’d found out about the bombing. This time, however, he reached out and wiped it away with his thumb, hand lingering just a moment too long on her face.

“You never wrote,” she finally choked out.

“Of course I did.” From his sling he pulled out about two dozen letters tied together. “I wrote every day. Couldn’t send them, and tossed out about half, but I wrote.”

Her hand was shaking as she took the letters, and then, suddenly, she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his shoulder. He wrapped his one good arm tightly around her and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of being close to her again. He could feel her sobbing quietly and he stroked her back as well as he could with only one hand. Finally, to his disappointment, she pulled back and looked him in the eyes.  
“But how did you survive? The whole base got blown up.”

His face took a grim set and he stared at the ground. “I was away from the first explosion, but my friend Smee wasn’t. I ran back in to save him, and got caught in the second. When I woke up a minute later, my uniform was on fire, my hand was crushed and charred black, and half of Smee was about four feet away from the other half. By then the ship was two-thirds sunk anyway, so I jumped in the ocean and swam as far as I could until someone saw me and sent out a boat to rescue me. I lost my friends and my pride, and I’ll never be able to avenge them because they won’t let a one-handed sailor serve.”

“One-handed?”

“It was too broken and burned to save, they cut it off. Lucky thing it wasn’t my right, or I really wouldn’t have written.” He grinned weakly, and she kissed him with a heated and urgent sort of kiss, pressing her body against his and grabbing his collar in her fist as if to keep him there. At last, too soon, she broke the kiss.

“I’m just glad you’re alive.”

He smiled that genuine smile again and replied, “As am I, Swan.” Then he kissed her, the first of so many slow, sweet kisses that in fifty years would still make her knees weak and her head dizzy, and if her lips weren’t otherwise occupied she would have smiled, really smiled, for the first time since December.


End file.
